Consider this a “prequel post” to my endeavor of relaunching my blog. This little snippet of information is some insight into good Search Engine Optimization practices, the importance of maintaining your website, and sharing a similar name with a celebrity. While reconfiguring my Google Webmaster account I discovered that the keyword ”matthew m” ranks 3rd in Google search results. Interested to see what I was up against, I googled away.

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Sure enough, Matthew McConaughey takes the top spot, with MatthewM.org coming in a cool third. I’ll take it! I also share the same name of a CEO at a top technology company and have mistakenly received his personal e-mails before. Such is life when you carry the torch of a familiar name.

What I also found interesting were the keywords that Google crawled in my old website. As discussed in a previous post, I recently moved from Drupal to WordPress. I fully admit, I did the one thing us Web Professionals constantly remind clients – I didn’t keep my site updated.

Drupal, in my professional opinion, is not for a personal blog. Scratch that. It’s not for a personal blog if you have ZERO time to keep the Drupal modules and core updated. Thus, my old site was plagued with spam and comments in other languages. Obviously, a tremendous hit on my SEO and search rankings.

So what have we learned? Use Google Webmaster tools to learn great information about your site and keep your CMS (or web code) updated. On the bright side, I’m still 3rd place to major celebrity Matthew McConaughey!